The Journey So Far

A chronological stroll thru the history of Broadway Musicals as they came to be recorded by Hollywood--the summation of a lifelong vocation, and a journey of self discovery. Equal parts cultural history, critique and personal memoir. Comingnext: Jersey Boys

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

July 23,
1982, Universal 114 minutes

Here's another show by Bway amateurs, Texans all, and more
evidence as far as I was concerned that The Big Street was going to the dogs
the year I left town. It seemed a sort of musical for people who don't like
musicals, carried by its open salaciousness and Grand Ole Opry-ready score;
something more suited for audiences in Atlanta, Tulsa or Vegas. But Whorehouse broke the Bway jinx on shows
about Texas, and ran an unbelievable four years. And even Hlwd took notice.

I don't know if it was a project actively lobbied by Colin
Higgins, or if he was simply contracted. He was as hot as he was ever going to
be coming off his 1980 blockbuster, Nine
to Five and could write his own ticket. His career began with Harold & Maude, a script written as his
Master Thesis at UCLA, and his quick ticket to Hlwd. But the film's initial
failure dampened his prospects, and it took several years--and a long Parisian
exile (where H&M was embraced,
and turned into a long-running stage hit) before he wrote another movie. Silver Streak earned him access to the
director's chair for his follow up, Foul
Play--and tho both were modest hits, Nine
to Five, was a smash; the year's #3 movie--grossing over $100 million at a
time when that was still a rare feat. But Whorehouse,
which grossed a robust $69 million, proved to be his next and final film. Undoubtedly
he would have continued a studio career had he not been felled by AIDS, dying
just a few years later at the age of 47. For one who started with such a
quirky, and for some, off-putting sense of humor, his style quickly tapped into
facile mainstream tropes, his writing more sitcom than sophisticated. Whorehouse was based on journalist Larry
L. King's Playboy article about a
real-life Texas bordello, which in collaboration with actor Peter Masterson, became
a libretto for a Bway musical, and later, screenplay (with Colin Higgins). The tale
concerns the demise of a local "institution" at the hands of a
hypocritical moralist. And the ending is a downer--softened, barely, by the
show's best song, "Hard Candy Xmas" a sort of dustbowl "Anatevka"--only
less poignant; after all these are whores
hitting the road, not the diaspora, but gals who need to pick themselves up,
dust themselves off, and start all over again. On Bway there wasn't even
romance. The Sheriff and the Madam (Miss Mona & Ed Earl) had a fling long ago,
but that was it. You'd think at least one of the girls would be involved with a
young cowboy john--but no. And not a lot of laughs either. What comedy there
was came from the obnoxious media maven, out to destroy the show's title establishment--its
very reason for being. Even worse, in the end the villain wins. But the show itself cannot pretend to a moralistic victory
given its cavalier attitude toward sex. No coy wink-wink here, it pretty much
spells out there's a whole lot of fucking going on at the Cadillac Ranch. But
it's just a good ole wholesome lube shop (no drinking allowed!--or is it "aloud"?),
a respected local business; a prize field-trip for the winning football

team.
But it isn't only those free-range Texan hunks in need of getting their poles
greased, the show wants to be an equal opportunity sexualizer; giving a
late-middle-aged black housekeeper (the updated Hattie McDaniel spot) a vulgar
lyric like "24 Hours of Lovin' " listing the various sex acts
she's planning on leave with her
boyfriend. It's kinda gross. Carol Hall's score is on keel with the book, which
is to say serviceable and entirely unmemorable. But there's no underestimating
the contribution of the fourth Lone Star native on the creative team, Michael
Bennett's protege & pal, Tommy Tune (who already had a Tony for his role in Seesaw) making his Bway staging debut.

Combining his Texan roots with Bway showmanship, Tune brought the
audience to its feet more than any other element. As a tune, "The Aggie
Song" is negligible, but Tune turns it into a testosterone fueled,
casually homoerotic jamboree. He was the last in the line of great
director/choreographers who bloomed thru the Golden Age, and he had the '80s
entirely to himself. His run of hits (Nine,
My One & Only, Grand Hotel, Will Rogers Follies) came to a screeching
halt in '94, when the quartet returned to produce a sequel called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public.
The public went for just two weeks. (Yet I find Carol Hall's score superior to
the original--which helps justify Tune's return as well.) But sequels to
musicals are virtually always disasters--a narcissistic exercise in milking the
cash cow; attempts to recapture past glories. In this case there wasn't much
glory to begin with.

Madam Mona is a definite star part, but neither Bway
production was cast with much of a known commodity (Carlin Glynn, who won a
Featured Actress Tony, and Dee Hoty in the sequel), but Alexis Smith was
recruited for the national tour, and in 2001 another road company rode on Ann-Margret's name across a wide swath of the country.

She was sixty then, and would've been
a creditable Mona 20 years earlier for the movie. But no one could fault the
casting of Dolly Parton who had recently crossed into features with Nine to Five, keeping her unique
personality intact. Whorehouse wasn't
exactly an acting stretch, but Dolly found the way to meld her Tennessee charms
with Hlwd glamour. She confidently sashays in Theodora van Runkel's dresses,
tailored to her curves like no one since Diamond Lil. The hair is all Texas,
which combined with the '80s, approachs parody--or Mae West.

She also brings
the bonus of her musical chops, adding a couple of songs including one from her
catalog, "I Will Always Love You," before Whitney got her pipes around
it. As her partner in victimless crime, Burt Reynolds was equally suited and at
the peak of his film career; the duo were a solid commerical pairing. And the screenplay
was rightly revised to give them an ongoing (if secret) romance, with a
trysting scene set to a Parton song, "Sneakin' Around with You," that
recalls the hootenanny yell of Sid & Babe's "There Once Was a
Man" in Pajama Game. As well as Dolly
in frilly lingerie and hirsute Burt (recently Cosmo's centerfold) cavorting in
boxer shorts. Less obvious, but delightful bit of casting was Charles Durning
for the "side-stepping" Governor. The well-loved character actor
tickled many with his fleet-footed turn in his one musical solo, so much that
he earned a highly unexpected Oscar nomination--the film's only Academy
recognition. But the choice of making Sheriff Ed Earl's dim-witted deputy,
Fred, the film's narrator, and then casting him as Gomer Pyle--er, Jim
Nabors--was doubly bad. Nor was Burt Reynold's pal, Dom DeLuise a fortunate
choice for TV henchman, Melvin P. Thorpe. In his awful Buster Brown wig, the
manic, loud-mouthed comedian takes the role into utter buffoonery; his scenes
an ordeal to sit thru. As the house mammy, Theresa Merritt (The Wiz's Aunt Em) smiles a whole lot,
and herds the girls like cats, but happily spares us her solo, "24 hours
of Lovin'." And Lois Nettleton (the other
Joanne Woodward) is given the scraps of Ed Earl's other woman--the respectable
one. Likely the combination of Texas and the '80s has something to do with why I
don't find any of the house girls appealing--nor does the script give them any
definition or storylines. And while a black and Asian girl fill the diversity
quota, there seems a curious, even insulting, lack of Latinas for Texas. Nor
are there any among the Aggie footballers, two of whom are future Bway
choreographers, Jerry Mitchell & Jeff Calhoun. But the boys are an eyeful
for sure.

The film opens with a visual history of the eponymous
"house," narrated by Nabors and scored to "20 Fans." It's
an amiable beginning that shows greater promise in short order with the
introduction of Dolly who launches into "A Li'l Ole Bitty Pissant Country
Place," a surprisingly well-built number, in several stages of time &
place. The next scene finds Burt & Dolly, "Sneakin' Around" in
towels and bustiers and a pair of snap-on briefs the boys call a Japanese sling
shot. But the film starts to nosedive with the entrance of Don DeLuise's
Thorpe. We're forced to endure two versions of "Texas Has a Whorehouse in
it"--

with intentionally tacky staging (which even if it's parody makes it
no fun to sit thru); and a slapstick bit being run out of Ed Earl's town. But
Mona & Ed Earl make an intersting couple and Dolly & Burt generate a
warmth in their chemistry. He's friendly with Jewell, too, the black house
matron, whom he calls affectionately "Porky"--which sounds rather
offensive to me. There's a welcome highlight in "The Aggie Song"--a
lockeroom strip that follows the showers with a robust jig in cowboy boots.
These boys are

smokin' and the sequence works all thru their arrival at the
Chicken Ranch, their backyard twirls with the ball-gowned whores peeling off to
their Victorian Secrets, and the subsequent raid by Thorpe, scattering all
sorts of bare-assed and tittie-exposed folk running hither & yon to the
sound of plucked banjo strings. The movie drops half a dozen songs from the musical
(including 3 of Mona's alone: "Girl, You're a Woman," "The Bus
from Amarillo," and "No Lies"). Upon Thorpe's filmed exposé, the
legal decision on the bordello's fate falls to the Governor, Charles Durning,
whose "Sidestep" number is also smartly filmed & edited--proving
Higgins had a good eye for movement and narrative in a number, which by the
time of "Hard Candy Xmas," we've come to expect. But instead of that being
the finale, Dolly gets an 11 o'clock number, her own "I Will Always Love
You"--the movie's only hit song. I confess I was expecting another
disaster of Annie proportions, so it
surprised me that the musical sequences are not just well-executed, but about
the only real points of interest, in what is otherwise a minor story with a
bummer ending.

My own life at that time was anything but a bummer. After
two rocky years adjusting to my ruptured life in SF, I was flush with my
bookstore "salary"; happy in my Nob Hill apartment; disciplined in my
writing habits; fully engaged in my ever-expanding cultural education. I met TC
Murov at a party on Valentine's Day in '81. We soon became friends & lovers
and over the years he funneled more good friends into my life than any other
single being. These were good years. During the week I was happily on my own;
on weekends we socialized with friends, lined up for first run movies and
frequented up & coming restaurants, like Zuni Cafe. In November I took TC
to NY for the first time. We caught Merrily
We Roll Along in its brief run on Bway--a flop that was anything but, in
our minds. Still planning a stand-up career (if only half-heartedly) we took
Laura to Caroline's comedy club, where a rowdy waitress named Reno stole the
evening with her tableside manner, and soon entered our life as Laura's
girlfriend. A Latina orphan raised by WASPs out of an Albee play--her mop of
black curls adding to her image as a Li'l Orphan Anita--(Karen) Reno was
volatile handful, who gave us plently of agita, laughter and excitement in
years to come. A month later TC & I went to Tahiti, where I spent my 29th
birthday in a thatched cottage on Moorea--and subsequent days on Bora Bora,
Raietaia and Tahaa' cast a deep hypnotic spell on me. Riding along Moorea's
coast in a Jeep I could imagine the strange juxtaposition of paradise and war--the
exotic allure of South Pacific. Tho I
was ready to return immediately, to this day I have yet to go back. The
following September we spent a week in Puerto Vallerta, mostly in our open-air
full-floor suite at a hillside fantasy called Ocho Cascades. where each in-room
pool cascaded into the one below. I was living under the radar, but living the
High Life, temporarily at least. It seemed a fitting complement to the bloated
Reagan years.

It was to New York that I returned with frequency--tho not
specifically for Bway. I went alone in April '82, when I was able to first catch
Dreamgirls, and again in October,
seeing Nine, Little Shop of Horrors andyes, I admit it, Cats; along with a number of plays, including Agnes of God, Torch Song
Trilogy and Angels Fall--I seemed
to follow Lanford Wilson's career more than any other over those years. TC
accompanied me for my 30th birthday in December, when we saw Nine, Eva LaGalliene's strangely antique
Alice in Wonderland, and William
Gibson's valiant if unappreciated sequel to The
Miracle Worker, in which a twenty-something, Helen Keller becomes a Member
of the Wedding to Annie Sullivan's late-life romance. Jane Alexander and Karen
Allen gave beautiful performances, but Monday
After the Miracle lasted just two weeks.

My ambitions at the time were torn between theater and
film, and tho I was pleased with my first screenplay, High Fidelity, I hadn't any clue or connections to move it further
along. Which made a return to playwriting the best viable option. I plugged
away at my East Village-Election-night '80 opus, State of the Art., while struggling on the side to come up with a
standup set that might launch me upon a career trajectory like Woody Allen's.
His film that summer--A Midsummer Night's
Sex Comedy--the first with his new muse, Mia Farrow, was a letdown after Manhattan & Stardust Memories. Nor was my other hero, Paul Mazursky's Tempest as enchanting as I wanted it to
be. But no amount of passion from my corner could make One from the Heart, anything but Coppola's downfall. Another fave
of '82, was the manifestation of an idea I'd been mulling over for some time
about the early years of live television. Tho I had envisioned a faux I Love Lucy setting,

My Favorite Year took a fictional Sid
Caesar variety show and ran with it--beautifully. (A decade later Ahrens &
Flaherty turned it into a musical, opening on my 40th birthday--but even with
Tim Curry, Andrea Martin & Lainie Kazan (repeating her blowsy Bklyn mother
role) the show somehow didn't enhance the movie, and lasted only a month.) I
had but nominal respect for Steven Spielberg up to then, but E.T. was hard to resist. An instant
children's classic on par with The Wizard
of Oz, I thought, but with the deluge of kids films in the decades
following, I'm not so sure how it's regarded these days. E.T. wasn't only that summer's runaway movie and the year's top
grosser, but flew past all records to take the All-Time title. With E.T. and Best Little Whorehouse, Universal was having a banner summer, with
money raining on the studio in buckets. But Whorehouse
stands no chance of classic status, 30+ years on it plays like a relic of its
time, as marginal (not to say negligible) as Moon Over Miami, The Court Jester or Viva Las Vegas.

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About this Blog

At the intersection of Broadway and Hollywood,

the Musical has been my lifelong touchstone. How did this happen? What does it mean? Herewith an analysis of my own"glass menagerie;" a Proustian trail of memory and perhaps a final summation of my thoughts and feelings on this unrelenting vocation.

About Me

A man on the verge of a musical breakdown. Why did I do it? What did it get me? Scrapbooks full of me in the background: New York, Hollywood, San Francisco. Palm Springs. This time, boys, I'm takin' the bows.